Esther Waters by George Moore (1894)

I am in the midst of what I like to call "Going Back to College" Lite.  I don't go to class, but I do all the reading--which is probably better than half the students, in the case of the British Victorian fiction class that I am reading my way through--those Victorians were
not about to use a paragraph when a chapter would do nicely.

Many of the books I was familiar with prior to the course, and quite a few had been made into BBC Dramas, so given my addiction to those I had seen a screen version prior to cracking open the book.  Not so with 'Esther Waters'.  Never heard of the book nor the author.

The story is set in England from the early 1870s onward and is about the life of a young, very religiously pious woman from a poor working-class family who, while working as a kitchen maid, is seduced by her supervisor's son, becomes pregnant, is deserted by her lover, and against all odds decides to raise her child as a single mother.  This is a seemingly insurmountable task at the time, and she really struggles with earning enough cash to manage it.  She has ups and downs, continues to make some of the same mistakes of her youth as she gets older, but at no point is the story unbearably miserable.

Two things are different about this story.  The first is that Esther is really quite a piece of work.  She knows what she thinks, and she is often not shy about sharing those thoughts with those around her.
She is almost socially inappropriate in her candor--which must have seemed quite forward at the time it was written.

The second thing is that the world of horses is the back drop for the novel--the world of  raising, training, racing and betting as it pertains to horses is woven throughout the novel, and is a nice bit of
fun to read about.  The men in the story are not all that admirable, and as I said before, Esther is not a shy and retiring woman, but not a peep about this being a feminist novel.

One thing that does come through loud and clear is that when there is no social safety net, people are forced to make very unpleasant choices, and that that situation is inhumane.  The passage of some
small step toward health care reform in the United States seems to have been late coming and bitterly opposed.  We are not a progressive people, for all the cultural influence we wield.